Hyderabad: Out of 21,091 state government employees who will be benefited in the next three years from Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao’s announcement of a moratorium on retirements, out of which, 610 employees will heave a sigh of the biggest relief as they were all set to retire in a week, on March 31, after attaining the superannuation age of 58 years.
If not for the retirement age hike by three years, 5,910 employees would have been retired by 2021-end, 7,850 in 2022 and 7,331 in 2023.
The retirement age in the state has been revised after a gap of 35 years and after nearly seven years of formation of Telangana. Chandrashekar Rao’s announcement to increase the retirement age to 61 years, makes Telangana the state with the highest retirement age.
In the undivided Andhra Pradesh the retirement age was 58 years since 1956. In all other states, retirement age is either 60 or 58 years. Even the retirement age of central government employees is 60 years.
In 1985, the-then Chief Minister of AP N.T. Rama Rao reduced the retirement age to 56 years, which triggered strong protests from various employees unions, who challenged the government orders in the High Court. The court ruled in favour of employees unions. Following this, the NTR government restored the retirement age to 58 years, which has been in force since then, including even after bifurcation in June 2014.
Soon after the bifurcation, neighbouring AP raised the retirement age to 60 years in June 2014. However, the Telangana government continued with a retirement age of 58 years till the historic announcement was made recently.
